The Last Hour (54 page)

I lay on the ground too, staring up at a flawless sky, and said, “You rock, Batman.”

He grinned. “Ray? When we get out of the hospital, can you come visit me? Dad’s too busy to play with me, and Mom, she’s no fun.”

Ah, shit,
I thought as my eyes watered. And I said, “Maybe. I can’t promise for sure. For one thing your parents would be all like, who is this strange man hanging around my kid? That’s never good. Plus ... well ... I don’t know if I’m gonna make it.”

“Why not? You thought of a ball and it came true. You made yourself into Spiderman.”

I frowned and held up my arm. It was true. My sleeves were red with a black web pattern on them. Just for kicks, I extended my arm like ... well, like Spiderman ... and shot out a web.
Holy shit.
It covered an air conditioning unit. That was gonna be a mess to clean up.
 

I sat up. “You have
got
to be kidding me,” I muttered.

How much power did imagination and hope have in this world? I’d returned Sarah to her body ... with her help, admittedly. But she was recovering, awake. She was in a lot of pain, sure, but she was
alive
to feel that pain. She still had a chance for that second kiss, for that life she wanted.

Suddenly my heart was beating in my chest. Because ... what if I could do it to myself? What if I could somehow free myself from this ... this oblivion ... and go back home to Carrie and my life?
 

I swallowed. “Maybe you’re right, kid.”

I got to my feet then pulled him up. “You mind if we go check on what’s going on with my body? It’s been all day, I’m worried they’re giving me tattoos or something.”

He snickered. “Why would they give you tattoos?”

“Kid, you never know what a bunch of women will do when your back’s turned.”

I don’t know why I felt such urgency to go back down. Maybe just to ... see.
 

How do you really know what hope can accomplish? Unless you try? So we slowly made our way back downstairs, back to the intensive care unit. Everyone was still there. Mom and Dad were leaning on each other, wounded, exhausted. Dylan looked like he was about to explode, and Alex was speaking with him, urgently, a serious and loving expression on her face. Crank and Julia were sitting across from her parents. I walked down the hall, eyes skipping past them, and glanced in at Sarah. Jessica was curled up in the chair next to her bed, eyes closed, and Sarah was asleep. Jesus, she was going to have a long haul recovering from this. I didn’t even want to
think
about the kind of pain she must be in with her leg cut open that way.
 

“Almost there,” I said to Daniel. And then we walked several doors further down.
 

My body was in there, the monitors all hooked up, the rasp of the respirator still forcing my body to inhale, exhale, because I wasn’t breathing on my own.
 

“You don’t look so good,” Daniel said.

“Thanks, kid.”

“But you didn’t die yet.”

I nodded. “There is that,” I said. I reached out and touched my body, and felt a shock, like when you accidentally touch a live wire. But I didn’t let go.

Was it possible?

I swallowed. I had a little time to decide. Because I wasn’t going to leave Daniel here alone. But when Daniel was better ... I was going to fight. I was going to fight to heal, fight for my life, fight for Carrie.

“It’s kinda creepy in here,” Daniel said.

“Yeah, it is,” I said. I reached out with my other hand and touched my body, and the contact was like two magnets coming together with a resounding
click.
This was so weird. I closed my eyes, and tried to
feel
what was going on in there. And ... well ... there wasn’t much. Not much at all. My heart was beating, and I could feel the blood rushing through my veins and arteries, pushing oxygen into my brain. But nothing from the head. It was like a big empty basket, and that could mean I was brain dead, or it could mean I just needed to be
in there
for anything to be happening. And I had no way of knowing which it was.
 

But ... just maybe.

I exhaled, audibly, and with some force pulled my hands away. Then I said, “Let’s go down the hall and check on your mom, okay?”

“Okay. Do you think they’ll still be sad?”

I shrugged. “Who knows? I’m guessing yes, because they love you and want you to be okay.”

He gave a half smile.

We walked back out toward the door of the ICU. My eyes darted from one to another of my family, both my parents and the family I’d inherited from Carrie. And I had a crazy moment where I felt such love for every single one of them, even Carrie’s dad and her crazy ass mom. It made me smile.
 

“So Daniel, when you get out of the hospital, you gotta keep all this secret, okay? Cause no one’s gonna believe you anyway.”

“Sometimes my mom calls me Crazy-Daniel.”

I laughed. “Well, in that case….”

I stopped talking. Because one moment he was skipping along, laughing and talking, and the next he bent over, his arms across his stomach, and he let out a groan.

“Hey kid, you okay?” I asked.

Oh, crap.
He was fading, just like Sarah, just like I had. I saw the floor right fucking through him, and he looked up at me, terrified.

“Ray?” he asked.

“Come on, kid. We gotta get going.” I picked him up, and half walked, half ran to the PICU with Daniel in my arms. He wasn’t heavy, and with just about every step I took he was getting lighter.

When we got to the PICU, I spied his parents. They were holding each other, and sobbing. Crap, crap crap, I thought. No. So I ran with Daniel in my arms, and burst into his room, and there was the kid.
 

He didn’t look like himself. Wasted away. His skin was almost grey. The doctors and nurses were surrounding him like a mob, the tiny little kid surrounded.

Sometimes, like with Speedy, there’s no time to make a choice. There’s no time to think, to react, to do anything.

But sometimes there is. Sometimes you look at a situation, and think about what could happen. I had ... maybe one second. I thought about everything I’d learned. I thought about what imagination and hope could accomplish. I thought about that little boy in Afghanistan with a bullet hole through his forehead, and the other little boy on this hospital bed—dying. And just like that, I made my choice.
 

I muttered, “Oh, God, Carrie, I’m so sorry.”
 

And then I did what I had to do.

I
f I could tell you that I was in any way sane
when I got back to the hospital I would. But I can’t. The court-martial was over. Ray was exonerated. But it was too late. When I got back to the hospital, they pulled me into a conference room. And all I could hear were the doctors saying the words
crisis
and
asystole
and
brain-death
.
 

I screamed and fell apart, and somehow Dylan and Julia dragged me away from the intensive care unit, and down to the hotel, where I collapsed in a sobbing mess.

I lay there, crying all night off and on. For the first time since I was twelve years old, my big sister Julia slept in the bed with me, because I couldn’t take being alone. When the sun shone through the windows, I was numb.
 

How could I make a choice to end Ray’s life?
 

That’s what they wanted from me. Nothing less than to tear my own soul out. Early this afternoon, the doctors would test Ray again. Twenty-four hours, they said, before they can declare brain death. But it was a done deal. Whatever happened to Ray while I was at the court-martial, he no longer had any brain activity at all. Just the machines keeping his heart pumping.
 

I closed my eyes. What would Ray do, if our positions were reversed?

Well, there was no doubt there. He’d do the right thing for me, and damn the cost to himself.

Very quietly, Julia said, “Are you awake?”

“I haven’t slept,” I responded.

“Oh, Carrie.”

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I said. “I think ... somehow I kept hoping. For a miracle. For something to make it all different.”

I turned and rested my head on my big sister’s shoulder, and said, “I wish ... I wish I could go back and change it. Change everything.”

She ran her fingers through my hair. “If I could take this pain from you, I would.”

I nodded. “I know. I’ll never forget it. But … what will I tell our daughter? Or son?”

Julia whispered, “You tell the truth. That he was the love of your life. That he was a hero. That in the end, he did the right thing, even though it cost him everything.”

I sniffed and put my arms around her.
 

“I think ... I want to go to the chapel this morning. And ... do some praying. Before I go see Ray.”

She nodded. “Yeah. I think that’s a good idea.”

So we slid out of the bed, and I changed clothes, and slowly, we walked the three blocks up to the hospital. It was another weird, beautiful day—the sky blue, the temperature just right—so much a lie when compared to how I felt inside. We walked past the old row houses, the traffic light for a Monday morning. Julia held my hand for the whole walk.

We walked up the steps to the side entrance of the main hospital building. An old, dirty baseball lay on the ground near the steps. And then we were inside, and I felt like I was walking into a tomb.

It took me ... hours ... to get back to the room where my body was.

I was weak ... incredibly weak. My body shook, shuddering with the pain. And the pain was alive, every part of me felt like I’d plugged myself into a light socket. I knew I didn’t have much time left. But I couldn’t just stop. I couldn’t let it go. Because I needed to see Carrie, if I could. I needed to tell her that I loved her, and that she ... that she needed to go on without me.

The kid was going to make it. I’d given him everything I had ... and then some. And when I crawled away from the pediatric ICU, his parents had fallen apart, collapsed with the knowledge that some kind of miracle had intervened and saved his life.
 

In the meantime, I had my own problems. I finally got back to my room, and collapsed in a heap next to the bed, not noticing the doctors frantically doing something to my body. There was a lot of noise and shouting and I don’t know what all. But it was hard to care right then. I just wanted to hold on until I could see Carrie again.

About an hour after that, I heard her. Screaming, frantically. I tried to get to her. I don’t know exactly what happened ... I guess maybe the docs told her the condition I was in. But by the time I got my head out of the door, all I saw was Dylan and Julia hustling her away.
 

I rested my head against the doorframe, and thought how grateful I was she’d still have them to depend on.

I spent the night, staring up at the sky through four floors of hospital and the roof. That was pretty cool really. That I could look straight up and see the stars twinkling. Then the moon rose, and I gasped, because I hadn’t seen it like that, so full and amazing, since I left Afghanistan.
 

Growing up on Long Island like I did, you don’t appreciate the sky, because it’s mostly featureless. I had no idea there were so many stars in the sky until the Army sent me halfway across the world, to a place where there weren’t any artificial lights for miles and miles and miles. A place where the sky was so crowded with stars you couldn’t see a spot without them, a place where falling stars were commonplace at night, because there were no lights to wash them out and make them invisible.

I drifted. It wasn’t exactly sleep. I don’t know what it was. I just wasn’t paying much attention, until a nurse came through, and not noticing my head in the doorway, stepped right on my face. I didn’t feel anything, but it freaked me out anyway. I was feeling slightly better. So very slowly, I climbed up on to the bed, which wasn’t really any more comfortable, because there was a body there. But better than nothing, I guess.

And I waited. Because I knew she would come.

But it wasn’t Carrie who came first. It was Dylan Paris.

Not long after sunrise, he strolled in the room, all alive and shit. But he didn’t look good. He slumped down into the chair next to me. And he didn’t say anything for a long time. He just watched me. Studying me.

After about ten minutes, he said, “I don’t know if you can hear me, Ray, but ... I’ve got a couple things to say.” He looked down at the floor and ran his hands through his hair, which had gotten pretty long since he became a college boy.
 

“I just need you to know ... I’ve ... never in my life looked up to anyone like I look up to you. You’ve been ... the best friend I’ve ever had. More than that really. And I just need you to know ... well…”

He sighed, and looked away, then back at me, and his eyes were red. He struggled to find words, his jaw working in frustration.